ABSTRACT
It is recorded of an old-fashioned schoolmaster that in the course of fifty years he administered to his pupils nearly half-a-million canings, and a hundred and twenty-four thousand proper floggings! This pedagogue, who in the days of Solomon would have been a man after that wise king’s own heart, may be taken as the type of a class of teachers who flourished “in the good old days”—rigid disciplinarians who never spared the rod nor spoiled the child. Happy schoolboys of the present day have but a faint notion of those times, or of the severities undergone at school by their fathers and grandfathers. Flagellation, except for garrotters, has gone nearly out of fashion in this country, and the birch of to-day is but the ghost of what it was a hundred years since, and the rod even of that period was only a faint shadow of the terrible whips and scourges of a much earlier age.
